


wheelburn

by punybastard



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, it's south central LA, skater/goth AU, slight injury/blood warning, the year is 2006, they're both chicana, yes. i am playing god. thanks for asking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-08 00:53:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21227081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punybastard/pseuds/punybastard
Summary: "The course of true love never did run smooth."-Tony Hawk, Pro Skater





	1. Chapter 1

Hot gold sunlight flares against her eyelids. “Hhngh,” Gideon says, waking up. 

“Get up.” Camilla pokes her hard in the torso with something. Gideon mentally downgrades her from _close homie_ to _huge dick,_ first for opening the blinds and second for cruel and unusual tactics. She cracks her eyes open. Camilla is prodding her with a shoehorn. 

“Piss off,” she says, very reasonably. 

“Get up.” 

“Caaaaa_aaaam.”_ Less reasonably. 

“You’re late.” Camilla mercilessly keeps poking. Gideon curls up fetally, which just means Cam is now poking her sort of in the kidney and it’s worse. “Last time you were late you got your sentence extended and I hate listening to you bitch about it.” 

“It’s not a sentence,” she says, muffled against the fabric. “‘Community service. S'a behavioral suggestion.” 

“A mandatory suggestion.” 

“Eat my butt.” 

This argument does not work. She keeps bothering Gideon with the fucking thing until she sits up and shoots her a crusty glare. 

Cam leaves, satisfied. Gideon blinks crud out of her eyes and looks down. She’s still in the t-shirt and cutoffs she was wearing yesterday, and there’s a greasy orange stain on the front of the shirt from a 7-11 taquito. Her mouth tastes like glue and also dumpsters. 

On the other hand, the sky through the blinds is very blue now that her eyes have adjusted. It’s kind of gorgeous out. She cracks her neck to work out the slept-on-a-sofa kinks while her brain comes slowly, goopily back online. Against all odds, she feels the rising certainty that it’s gonna be a good day. 

“It’s eight forty-eight,” Cam yells from the bathroom. 

“Oh, shit,” Gideon says. She tucks the front of her shirt in so that the greasy spot is sort of hidden, steals Camilla’s blueberry waffles from the toaster, grabs her board, and is gone. 

\------- 

It’s not really that she cares about being late, just that it’s still like a cool seventy out and she feels energized from the combination of waffles and sleeping for eleven hours. Really, she hauls ass just for fun. She pushes past the prettied-up folks streaming into church, and the paleta lady, and the plateless van that she’s pretty sure someone’s living in. She does a sick nollie and some kids see it and yell. Overall she’s got a pretty good buzz going that isn’t even crushed when she reaches the drab poured concrete of the middle school. She hops her board up over the curb and rolls through the empty halls. They’re all quiet and gum-covered and sad without the hordes of kids. It’s eight fifty-nine when she rolls slowly up to the only unlocked classroom in the entire place, whistling as she turns the corner. 

Then she almost falls off her board. 

Her eyes transmit the sight but her brain refuses to accept the image. She stares at the mirage waiting for it to go away. Harrow stares back. She’s as still as a painting except for the thin curl of smoke up from her cigarette. Gideon feels her high spirits crash and burn, screeching across six freeway lanes before detonating. No survivors. 

“Hello, Gideon,” says five foot six inches of black fabric and purest hate. 

“Hot Topic,” Gideon says gravely. _“Why are you here.” _

“As physically and spiritually nauseous as it makes me,” she says, taking a drag, “for the same reason you are.” 

“For community service? You? What did you do?” Gideon asks, staring. “Stab someone? Nut on a library book?” She kicks her board up into her hand. “Break the world record for _biggest ever piece of bitch?” _

Harrow flicks the lit butt directly at Gideon and stalks into the room. 

Gideon, mourning her day, follows. She slumps mutinously in a desk at the back of the room, staring at Harrow’s skinny back. She’s done some awful shit in some past lives if this is really how her day is gonna go. 

Then she remembers her plan and brightens incrementally. Not her whole day, maybe. 

“Good morning!” Teacher claps his hands and looks around sunnily at the general extreme sullenness of the room. Standing, his head is at nearly the same level as Gideon’s is sitting. His bright flowery Hawaiian shirt feels like a sick joke. “Is everyone ready to Build A Better Downtown today?” 

The silence festers. 

“Wonderful,” says Teacher. “Let’s begin!” 

\---------

Approximately one million years ago, Gideon had considered Harrow a friend. Her best friend, even. It’s pretty embarrassing in retrospect, the way she’d trailed eight-year-old Harrow around like a puppy. She used to go over to the big dark Nonagesimus house and lay on Harrow’s floor for hours, reading comics and watching all starry-eyed as Harrow learned how to string bone together. She made little knuckle-and-tendon spiders that would skitter around for Gideon to stomp on. If Gideon got restless, Harrow would make constructs for her to wrestle with, sitting on her bed straining with the effort of keeping them together. 

And they’d gotten older, and kept hanging out. Even once Gideon found a crew and learned to skate. Even when Harrow flung herself into her studies until her skin took on that tinge you see on people who hang out exclusively under fluorescents. 

One day, she’d been walking Harrow back from the library, which was not unusual. It was a peachy-purple dusk and bleary with heat as they took the usual path through the park. She was half-listening to Harrow complain about some new reanimation law, half-intent on demolishing the cold paleta in her hand. The paleta was faring very, very badly in the warm air, and getting all down Gideon's arm. Gideon was in the process of licking chile-pineapple sugar water off her wrist when she realized Harrow had stopped dead. 

She’d glanced over. Harrow had looked away quickly, but not quickly enough. Gideon had known her most of her life and could read her better than she could read a literal physical book. 

“Hey,” she’d said, and grinned, and grabbed her friend's narrow wrist before she could walk off. 

Harrow, caught, had opened her mouth, then closed her mouth. Then_ flushed. _Gideon peered close for confirmation, and there it was: an actual blush on her sleek, narrow face. 

“Hey, Harrow,” she’d said again. Her heart was floating a couple inches above where it was usually tethered down, and so she was making up her mind to do a fairly stupid thing. 

Harrow’s eyes shone a dark, dark black in the dim streetlamp light. 

“Yes, Griddle?” 

And then Gideon had leaned in and done the stupid thing, for no reason other than that she really wanted to. Harrow had quite reasonably never forgiven her. 

They hadn’t really spoken in nearly six years. 

\------- 

Now here she is strolling down the concrete throat of the dried-up canal. Harrow walks beside her in a dark, infectious spiritual fug. They’re both wearing eye-searing orange t-shirts. Gideon’s is rolled up at each shoulder but Harrow’s wearing it over her long-sleeved black shirt, the freak, as if heat isn’t already shimmering low on the ground. They're also lugging big heavy-duty trash bags. She would gladly trade a couple thumbs to be with any of the other lowlifes, but Teacher had paired them off. The bastard. 

Her board is tucked under one arm. She spins a wheel idly. 

"So," she opens conversationally. 

"None of your business," Harrow says tonelessly. "Eat needles and die." 

".....what'd you do," Gideon finishes. 

Harrow doesn't respond. She's raised a couple skeletal arm-tripods to scuttle around and pick up trash for her, and one of them flings a liquor bottle at Gideon. 

She dodges. The plastic bottle doinks against the cement. 

"Okay, cool, be that way. See if I care." She kicks at some trash. "I’m outta here anyway.” 

“Are you?” Harrow’s dark little eyebrow quirks up high. 

“Yeah.” She looks over her shoulder for Teacher, confirming he’s not there. “Check this shit out, La Llorona.” She props her foot up on the side of the canal and peels the big palm-sized bandage off her knee with a flourish. Beneath is a huge scab, all crusted up dark and rancid yellow with congealed pus. She got it trying to do a flipside nasty on the library railing. It’s completely gnar. 

Harrow’s thin lip curls. “Is your plan to disgust everyone enough to leave you here?”

"I'm gonna run up to Teacher, tell him I tripped on some trash, do a little boo-hoo-hooing, and then bam. I'm Audi." 

Harrow looks at her with a stare like two holes in the fabric of the universe. 

"Audi five hundo. To clarify." 

"You're a larger idiot than the human race has yet proved possible." Harrow says. "That won't fool anyone. Look at it." 

"Suck my ass," she says automatically, and looks at it. Fine, so it's a little crusted over.

”Wait,” Harrow says, and grabs her shin. Gideon stares down at the hand, which is touching her. Harrow has fine, slim-boned fingers and a surprisingly strong grip. The goth’s face contorts strangely – her jaw jerks to the side, and she winces. 

“What–” she starts, and then Harrow leans over and hocks a hot scarlet mouthful of blood onto her scabby knee. 

Gideon gapes as the vivid red drips down her shin. Harrow must have bitten the inside of her cheek, hard. 

“That’s the single grossest thing anyone’s ever done for me,” she marvels, oddly moved. 

“Honored.” She scowls, and there's an unnerving rime of scarlet inside her mouth. “Now get us the hell out of here.” 

Gideon's brain doesn't really register 'us'. “Yo, Teach!” He turns. Gideon heads over, sagging her weight dramatically onto the other leg. 

“Oh dear,” he murmurs when she reaches him. 

“I fell. I’m, uh, pretty fucked up.” She casts around her memory for episodes of Scrubs. “I think I need tetanus shots, definitely. Or an IV. Of...iodine?” 

It works like a charm. Except Teach sends Harrow with her, because he's a slavering adherent to the buddy system, so really it works like a curse. The important thing is that is works, and Gideon gimps away with one (1) sworn archnemesis in tow.

"Is he out of sight yet," she mutters, and Harrow checks behind her for the hundredth time. 

"Almost. Limp faster." Harrow hisses. 

"If I was limping any faster I'd be sprinting."

Finally they round a corner. Both of them wrestle the horrible orange shirts off and fling them aside. 

"Okay," Gideon says. "Thanks for tagging along, it's been awful, see you never?" 

"Please," Harrow says, with feeling. 

Gideon drops her board, leaps onto it, and pushes off. She's free and feels just fine, thanks for asking, now that she's gotten off of litter patrol, and the whole day is stretching out bright and full of possibility, with the gloomy shadow of Harrow far behind her. 

Speaking of which. 

"Yo Harrow," she yells, looking over her shoulder. 

Harrow turns around. 

Gideon's trained for this moment her whole life. She tucks a toe under the board and tilts it as she heaves her body up, coming up into a nice high kickflip. Airborne, godlike, she flips Harrow off with both hands and lets out a massive belch. 

Then she sticks the landing, because she's Gideon Nav and she's great at everything. 

The look on Harrow's face is worth every skinned elbow in history and then some. Gideon's all doubled up laughing at it, so she doesn't see the curb. She does feel it when gravity yoinks her board out from under her feet, and she does hear it when her skull hits the curb with a deep, awful thwack. 

So much for her exit, she thinks. A narrow black figure abruptly looms and folds itself next to her. There's little hands on her head. 

The sun is directly above her. 

“Don’t fucking pass out,” says Harrow. She sounds very close. “Don’t make this my problem. Don’t you god damned fucking dare.” 

“Skate or die,” Gideon whispers, and then the world goes black. 


	2. Chapter 2

Lines and shapes move overhead, more quickly than things usually move. Wires and poles. An upside down pigeon? Gideon mentally flips her frame of vision over: she’s laid out in the back of a car, looking up at streetlights and phone lines. Whose car? It smells clean, so probably not anyone Gideon knows. 

She tilts her head up to behold a pointy little person in the passenger seat. It’s Harrow, haranguing the driver, whose face Gideon can’t see. 

“Harrow?” She says. She remembers Harrow. She hasn’t seen Harrow in years. Her head hurts kind of a lot. 

The little dark head whips around. _“Griddle,”_ she says. Her face does a lot of emotions in very quick succession and Gideon is in absolutely no state to figure out what any of them are. 

“Ow,” she observes, out loud. 

“You– _unparalleled_ nincompoop,” Harrow says. Instead of the usual brittle ice in her voice she sounds genuinely distressed. This has too many implications to think about, so Gideon passes back out. 

-

A crisp voice reaches down and plucks Gideon out of unconsciousness. 

“–of sleep a night,” it’s saying, very professionally. “And for the next few days steer clear of alcohol, caffeine, heavy exercise, and too much screentime.”

“Turns out those video games really do rot your brain, eh?” A new voice, excessively chipper. 

Gideon opens both eyes (they feel sticky) and gets a surprise eyeful of Harrowhark for the third time today. She’s sitting in an antiseptic vinyl chair the same way a black hole would sit if it had a bony pair of glutes to sit on, and she’s staring at whoever’s talking like they’re pulling a gun on her. 

This turns out to be a middle-aged doctor lady with the shiny hair and crisp voice. She’s speaking rapid-fire and scribbling on a clipboard and basically being as doctor-y as a person can be. The other voice is the RN to Gideon’s left, a middle-aged guy washing his hands in the mini sink and whistling and overall totally lacking the doctor vibe. 

“-for at least the next 72 hours, but definitely supervised throughout. And no necromancy, if she’s necromantic at all.” The doctor lady finishes up and unclips a bunch of papers and hands them to Harrow. “She’ll be alright – just get home home and rested,” she adds, thinking Harrow’s expression is concern and not a catastrophic aneurysm at the suggestion that Gideon is a necro. 

Then they both leave, the guy patting Harrow consolingly on the shoulder. Harrow looks at Gideon, sees that she is awake, and gives her a death glare like only Harrow can give a death glare: hot, depthless, black, a point-blank promise of pain. 

“Can we go home now?” Gideon says, raspy. “I think you’re supposed to tuck me in.” 

-

They go home. It’s dusk outside the hospital, and the muggy heat makes Gideon’s skull spin as Harrow flags down a second taxi. Nobody talks. She slumps her head against the cool window in the backseat and unsubtly watches Harrow’s face in the sideview mirror. It’s been so long but her sharp, angry face has changed so little. Not counting the hollows under her eyes, which are absolutely so drastic, like, stage-makeup deep. Unbidden, a vivid memory swims up to Gideon: a younger Harrow, slumped asleep over her desk and dream-twitching against the open pages of a book. 

Harrow’s eyes flick over to the sideview and Gideon shuts her eyes fast and pretends to be asleep. Stupid – not fast enough. 

\- 

It’s with an air of complete and total surreality that Gideon lets Harrow help her out of the taxi and up the stairs into her and Camilla’s apartment. Harrow says nothing, probably because she’s figuring out the slowest way to kill Gideon once they’re in private. Gideon says nothing, because she’s concentrating super hard on remaining upright and also not upchucking on her Chucks. 

Harrow dumps her on the couch inside and disappears. Gideon slides gratefully into sleep. 

Or at least she tries to. Someone is kicking her very sharply in the shin, which, like, rude. She peels her eyes open and of course it’s Harrow. She looks so strange in the familiar background of Gideon’s place, like she’s been cut out of a magazine and pasted in, so small and dark and angular. Inexplicably, she’s also holding a glass of water. 

“Drink,” she says, and thrusts it at Gideon. 

Gideon drains it, surprised by her own thirst. “Uh, thanks,” she says, and it feels inadequate. “For not leaving me to bleed out. That was shockingly tight of you.” 

She crosses her arms. “I regret it already.” 

“Right. Look, you don’t have to stick around though. You got me back home. I can handle it from here.” 

Harrow sighs. “Nav, I don’t doubt that if you fell asleep and sustained permanent brain damage my day would be improved. But I’d have to explain to Camilla Hect why I let her roommate lapse into a vegetable state, and I’d like to avoid that conversation at all costs.” 

“Wait,” Gideon says, “what the fuck? You know Cam?” 

“Enough that I endeavor to remain on her good side. I’m staying put.” 

Gideon tries to think through the dull, painful fog, and then gives up. She regards Harrow, and Harrow regards her. The seconds draw uncomfortably out until Gideon just cannot fucking stand it anymore. 

“Look,” she says wildly. “D’you wanna – sit down?” 

This catches Harrow off guard. She glares suspiciously at the couch cushions, like a cat who’s never been inside before, and then delicately sits at the absolute extreme far end. 

“Great. Perfect,” Gideon says, and tosses her a Playstation controller. 

“Dr. Pent very clearly said to avoid screens,” Harrow said. “Moreover, I am not–”

“What’s that?” Gideon interrupts, pitching her voice up all nasally. “‘Hey, Griddle, let’s sit in weird awful silence for three hours until Cam comes home. That sounds so fun. We can look at the wall. That sounds like super mega good times.’” 

“Point... taken,” Harrow says, and picks the controller up with two fingers like it’s roadkill. 

It doesn’t feel like three hours before Harrow is crouched over the controller like a horrid little goblin, burglarizing a civilian in Grand Theft Auto. Gideon’s sniggering like an idiot as Harrow fails yet again to shoot remotely in the right direction. 

“-your grandmother and grandfather before you, wretch,” she’s muttering. “I’ll unstring your spine–” 

“Hello,” says Camilla, from behind them. 

Harrow drops the controller like it’s scalding. 

“Hi, Cam,” says Gideon. “This is Harrowhark.” 

“We’ve met,” Cam says slowly. “What happened to you.” 

“It seems someone let her outside off-leash,” Harrow says. “A mistake, surely.” 

“Are those stitches?” Camilla asks. 

“Everyone’s kind of on my case here?” Gideon says. 

“She fell off her skateboard attempting to flip me off,” Harrow says, with obvious relish. 

“Attempted, my ass,” says Gideon. “I’d skate off a cliff if I got to flip you off doing it. I’d skate into Hell.” 

“Perhaps the only dream we share between us,” Harrow says, standing up. “I’m taking my leave. Hect, Nav is concussed and in possession of four fresh stitches on her hollow skull. Griddle –” 

She looks down at Gideon, considering. Her expression is very different without a brittle sneer on her face. 

“I hope you wander into a wood chipper. Good night.” 

“Cool, so, maybe work on the bedside manner,” Gideon yells as she sweeps out. “What?” 

Cam is looking at her with a facial expression that sets Gideon’s guts to squirming. 

_”What?"_ she repeats, but Cam just shakes her head and goes to refill her water. 

-

About two weeks have passed, enough time for the whole incident to fade away like an embarrassing fever dream, before the knock on the door. Gideon's right about to slide into a nap and very nearly doesn't answer it, except sometimes a pizza accidentally gets delivered to them instead of to the dickbags in the next unit over and she so dearly loves to intercept a pizza. 

It's not a pizza. “Harrow?” she says, very stupidly. She looks like a wet bat. There’s a choker of chunky white molars around her thin brown neck, which, ew. 

In lieu of saying any kind of basic human greeting she pulls a piece of paper out of her stupid robe thing and thrusts it at Gideon like it’s got anthrax on it. 

Gideon looks. It’s a flyer that has been badly designed in MS paint, printed on cheap paper, stapled to a pole phone, and then ripped off the phone pole. There’s a big pixelated gravestone and a bunch of clip art skulls. The gravestone reads, in drippy gothy font: 

**NEC & NEC!!!!!!!!!!!!  
NECROMASTERS BATTLE XVII PART TWO:  
THE NEKRO RECKONING **

And, farther down, in smaller print and an even less legible typeface: 

**MIDNIGHT AT THE RIVER  
DM THE_SLEEPER TO RSVP  
MUST! HAVE CAV TO COMPETE **

And at the very bottom: 

**_DO U HAVE WHAT IT TAKES,,. 2 DEAL DEATH WITH THE BEST?_**

“Okay, thanks,” Gideon says. “Because this is hilarious. But why are you at my place, in my face, making me look at it.” 

“Because you owe me,” says Harrowhark, the point of her chin tilted imperially up. 

“Do you… did you make this? Do you want critique? Graphic design is my passion,” Gideon says. “First off, you really skimped on the skulls.” 

“You really are going to make me ask.” She looks at a fixed point somewhere above Gideon’s head and says, like she’s having a tooth pulled: “I need you to be my cavalier.” 

Gideon gapes. 

“This–” she shakes the flyer. “You’re _going_ to this?” 

“Yes.” 

“I don’t believe you.” This is a trap. It has to be. This is a weird belated revenge plot and Harrow’s going to slit her throat and stuff her down a storm drain. 

She huffs, non-cutely. “Griddle, I know it’s a carnival of imbeciles, organized by imbeciles and attended wholly by imbeciles. But it is, undeniably, a display of necromantic skill. And I lack – a practical arena for my skills.” 

This whole situation is making Gideon think of a thirty-car pile-up on the 5. “Listen, Deadward Scissorhands. This is probably bad dudes. All kinds of bad dudes, who are bad news. I get that you’re tired of kicking around the library doing bone calculus, because literally who wouldn’t be, but, uh. Can’t you just join the Necro Club nerds at school? Instead of dropping straight into this death derby thing, which is gonna be stabby at worst and full of clown-ass posers at best?” 

Harrow’s pinching the slender bridge of her nose. “Griddle,” she starts, and it’s so condescending that it rankles all the way down to Gideon's gut. “Necro club _levitates knucklebones_. There isn’t anyone in necro club who can look me in the eye without wetting their trousers, let alone assemble a basic construct. The library hasn’t had material at my level since grade school. There isn’t conventional necromantic knowledge available that I haven’t surpassed, because it all dead-ends theoretically at anything actually interesting, actually useful. So I am forced to be – unconventional.” 

“Yeah, but, this is a fight. Not after-school lessons. You get that, right? I need you to understand that this is a fight.” Gideon’s still in PJ pants with little donuts on them. This whole thing feels surreal. 

It doesn’t work. “Understand that I am not boasting when I tell you I am the best bone witch in South Central. I would be shocked to discover I am not the best bone witch in LA.”

Harrow pins her with that piercing black look she does so well. 

“Griddle. I am not worried about– _bad dudes._ I am bad dudes.” 

Okay. 

“Why me? You hate me.” 

“An excellent question,” she says meditatively. “I do. So why come to a cretin? Why should a necromantic scholar like myself need someone who fractures her skull on concrete for a hobby? Why an imbecile with hot Cheeto crumbs in her hair?” 

“Hey, this is so fun,” says Gideon. “Let’s do this more.” 

Harrow’s mouth presses into a thin line. “Because I’m not looking for a cavalier, Nav, not really. It isn’t how I operate. I’m looking for the bare minimum. I need someone to help me qualify for the fight, carry spare bone, and stay out of the way.” 

“Sure,” she says, leaning against the door. “Question stands. Plenty of people could do that. Why me?” She knows, she’s just fishing now. She wants to make Harrow admit that she has no one else to ask, because she’s a repellent little tomb-raiding rat. 

Harrow chews furiously on the inside of her cheek. “Because you owe me,” she says, and before Gideon can point out that she’s already used that one, she adds: “and in the infinitely slim eventuality that things do– go wrong, who knows. Maybe you can even still fight.” 

“You bet your ass I can still fight,” Gideon says reflexively, which, shit, sounds like agreement. 

“Fantastic,” she says flatly. “Meet me at half an hour to midnight at 18th and Somerset. Wear black. Don’t make a fool of me, and don’t be late.” 

Before Gideon can process literally any of this, Harrow whips around in a swirl of black fabric and stalks off. Gideon stands in the open doorway, wishing she wasn’t still clutching the shitty flyer in her hand. Belatedly, she runs a hand through her hair, checking for Cheeto crumbs. (There’s nothing.) 

-

She goes, of course. She can’t not go, although she thinks all day about how very much she could just not go. She sits on the couch and turns the Simpsons on and eats chips and very seriously considers just staying there because Harrow turned her back on Gideon very permanently, years ago, and just because she did the bare minimum Good Samaritan thing last week and didn’t leave Gideon to bleed out on the sidewalk doesn’t mean Gideon has to like, swear fealty. 

Then again. It was admittedly not completely awful having her there playing shitty video games for the few hours Gideon was an invalid. They were friends once, and it stings to think about it. They’ve been openly hateful for the last however many years, and that was comfortable and fine. But now it feels like the bottom has dropped out of that hot ugly spite she’s used to feeling, looking at Harrow, and Gideon’s not sure what’s left when that’s gone. She's not enough of a dunderhead to think they could be, like, friends again. Blech. But it does feel like something's unbalanced their brick wall of hate. 

So really, it’s down to curiosity. When she rolls up to the intersection that night, Harrow’s there leaning against a plywood-covered window. She’s grown a large hunch on her back. 

“Sup,” Gideon says. She catches the telling flash of emotion in Harrow’s eyes. It’s relief – she hadn’t been sure Gideon would come. That turns Gideon’s stomach in a way she just absolutely refuses to investigate. 

“Here.” Harrow peels the hunch off and hands it over. It’s a black Jansport. Full of bones. 

“Cool, you brought snacks.” Gideon slings it over one shoulder and it makes the world’s most unpleasant noise. Kinda like a backpack. One that’s full of bones. 

“What is _that?_” Harrow says. Gideon follows her line of sight down to the baseball bat she’s holding. 

“Duh, my sword.” She hefts it over one shoulder. “What, you wanted an unarmed cav?” 

“It’s a stick. For sports,” Harrow says. 

“It’s the finest tool ever made for dealing serious damage,” Gideon says. “Other than the one in my pants. Look, Enoby Dork’ness, d’you wanna go or not?” 

Harrow scowls. They go. 

-

Gideon basically considers all necromancers unbearable, fragile little posers, and as far as she knows they spend most of their time sitting in coffeeshops being angsty or standing in badly lit goth nightclubs being angsty. She’s always assumed Harrow did this too, but lamer, like she probably stands around at necro raves and then goes home to write a long bitchy letters of complaint about how the skeleton bartender’s ribs were articulated out of order. She associates necros with study hall and blackboards and unbelievably dull debates about like, X ghost divided by Y spooky equals who cares. 

As she rounds the corner with Harrow and the LA river comes into view, it dawns on her that this mindset may be somewhat limited. 

It’s not a river, not really. The wide, flat concrete sides of the canal slope down to a thin ribbon of dark water, like someone left a garden hose running somewhere upstream. On both sides the huge concrete gutter leads away into thick night. But down in front of them it’s lit up like a rave on Christmas: someone’s dragged out a generator to power a huge ring of floodlights. A dozen or so muscle cars have been driven down into the canal, and people are revving their engines, blasting music, milling around in obvious excitement. In the middle of it all is a wide, empty circle made of thousands of jumbled bones, maybe fifty feet across and neatly bisected by the trickle of river. 

“Okay, dope,” she breathes. “You didn’t tell me this would kick ass.” 

When she looks over, Harrow’s huge dark eyes are positively glittering. She takes a step forward and slides down the long concrete plane into the canal. It’s objectively a pretty sick move. Gideon follows. 

-

The vibe at the River is just tooth-grindingly, bowel-tighteningly tense. Everyone is standing around in pairs awkwardly muttering and pretending really hard to not be scoping each other out. Harrow glares at nothing, like she’s stuck waiting at the DMV with these people and someone cut the cheese. Gideon openly ogles back. 

It's not the gothfest she had been expecting. There's some of that, but other than that it's a real grab bag of people. She picks out a startlingly hot blonde, some dudes in all-white – hospital scrubs? – some teenagers who are definitely not supposed to be here, and a gym rat of a dude so humongous he makes the wheelchair he's pushing look like a toy. She can't even tell who's a nec and who's a cav. Except for the frail body in the wheelchair. That's a nec if she's ever seen one. 

Harrow's pointy elbow jabs her in the ribs. "Quit rubbernecking." 

Gideon shoves back. "No. Up yours." 

Harrow opens her mouth, but the retort never makes it out: her eyes refocus laser-sharp on something else. Gideon turns around. Someone is walking straight through the little cocktail-party globs of people towards the center ring. Conversation grinds to a halt in concentric rings as people take notice. 

This person has a strange, blocky frame, and is in head-to-toe Day-Glo orange. Gideon realizes it's some kind of biohazard suit, with crinkly astronaut arms and legs and a long zipper up the front and a huge, square plastic visor, behind which nothing at all is distinguishable. They've got a quick stride and a businesslike manner, vaulting briskly over the ring of bones and stopping in the dead center. 

The person does something quick with their hands and arms that Gideon can't see. Then a very familiar noise starts up – it's bone on bone. The wide messy ring is rising convulsively upwards, femurs and ribs tumbling end over end, finger bones springing up like grasshoppers as the piles resolve themselves into upright skeletons. The constructs, fully assembled, reach out and take each other's hands like a string of cutout paper dolls. Then they angle their skulls upwards to the smog, jaws falling slack. After a heartbeat their empty eyesockets start to glow. The wattage cranks up and up until each skull is beaming out a pair of beacons, the light the flat white light of industrial LED banks. 

Nobody moves. The bass-thumpy music dies out like it's embarrassed, and even through the thrum of the generators Gideon can tell everyone's holding their breath. 

"SHUT UP," says the figure in orange, into the silence. It's a woman's voice, gravelly and stacticky and too-loud, like it's being played through a speaker. Even in the blaring light the face shield is tinted so dark it's black. "FIGHT NIGHT. SEVENTEEN PART TWO. GROUND RULES. YOU OR YOUR CAV SPEND TEN SECONDS ON THE GROUND, YOU LOSE. YOU OR YOUR CAV EXIT THE RING BEFORE THE MATCH IS CALLED, YOU LOSE. YOU CROSS THE RIVER, YOU LOSE. CAVS CAN CROSS. CAVS CAN TOUCH CAVS. CAVS CAN TOUCH CONSTRUCTS. CAVS CANNOT TOUCH NECS. YOUR CAV ATTACKS THE OTHER NEC, YOU FORFEIT."

There's a pause. 

"YOU OR YOUR CAV DIES, YOU LOSE. PRIZE TONIGHT IS BRAGGING RIGHTS. NEWBIES FIGHT FIRST. YOU." They point at someone outside the ring, at maybe 10 o'clock from where Gideon and Harrow are standing. 

"Yo. Die?" Gideon mutters to Harrow. "Like, _die_ die? Cause–" 

"AND YOU." The second gloved orange hand is aimed directly at them. 

Gideon's still interpreting this as reality when Harrow starts gliding toward the ring. Having apparently missed the self-preservation memo, her body follows on autopilot. They duck in under the joined hands of two skeletons. The blank white construct eyeball-light makes it impossible to see very far past the ring, shrinking their world down to a circle. Harrow looks extra small and extra black in the ring, an icy little pillar of black lace. Her eyes glitter in the way that Gideon knows means business. The bad kind. 

Across the gross little trickle of water another duo is stepping in. The nec is a tall girl with an angular face and a red dress. Two short horns, the color of dirty ivory, poke up through her hair. Her nails are very long and very red. Her cav is also tall, a young dude in a black-and-white tracksuit with a shaved head and a scowl. 

The orange announcer walks abruptly out. They vault up onto one of the parked cars, its springs jouncing, and face the ring.  
There's a faint whine of feedback from the mask. "READY?" 

"Ready," calls the girl in red, in a reedy voice. Her cav lurks half a pace behind her. 

Gideon's distantly aware of the sweat starting to bead under her shirt in the hot white light. It's a completely ridiculous setup for a fight – to have to deal with two free agents and who knows how many constructs and who even knows what the other nec's specialty is – but it doesn't seem to matter right now. Her bat rests against one shoulder. Her heartbeat feels slow and huge.

She looks at Harrow, who is flexing her fine thin fingers. 

"Ready," says Harrow.


End file.
